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Comment by oxfordmale | Hacker News Reader

Ignoring the hype, Tesla cars aren't better objectively from a purely functional approach. If I fill my current vehicle with diesel, I can drive 500 miles, fill up the tank in less than 15 minutes and drive back. With a Tesla or any other EV, I will spend several hours at charging points. EVs are great for local rat runs to the supermarket or nearby restaurants. However, they are still painful if you want to travel more than 100 miles.

Battery technology improvements will arrive. However, it takes time to productionise research prototypes.

During one of my holidays, I drove a self-charge BMW rental. It technically could still be sold after 2035. However, it had an electric range of less than 50 km before it switched to petrol. Car manufacturers will lobby for such loopholes to be allowed well beyond 2035.

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This is your uninformed opinion.

I own one, I have never spent more than an hour waiting for any charge. The waiting time is also not wasted, I'll go eat or work on the laptop. Cumulatively over the year I have definitely spent less waiting at a charging station than I did with the fossil car I had previously. Most of the time it's just charged itself overnight when I slept.

It is SO MUCH CHEAPER to drive the EV than it is the ICE. Fuel cost ALONE pays for the monthly payments. Let alone having a modern car, better ergonomics, etc.

Do you hear yourself? You are admitting you have to stop for an hour any time you do a long trip, and apologetically claiming you can find something useful to do in that time. What kind of bs propaganda did you swallow? When I’m doing a road trip I don’t want to add one hour minumum per every few hundred miles, assuming I can find a charging station. Range limitations are the second reason why people don’t buy EVs, behind required home infrastructure expenses (a hidden one time tax).

My partner and I both drive cars that are almost 20 years old, so do our parents. Oil changes, tires, and a monthly fill up for $60 or trip fillup of $120 for about 700 miles. That’s it.

Todays EVs are like cell phones from 1985 with styling that appeals to the Pokémon generation.

My fill up for 1100km is less than 10EUR.

The only time I remember charging for 1h was when the charger happened to be a free 50kW charger. Why not.

During road trips it's much more like 15 minutes every 3 hours. Completely enough to keep going until people inside the car can't take it anymore, not a limitation of the car/battery. You make it sound like the stopping part is the hard part not sitting in a car that long.

I drive for about 300 miles, or five hours, then charge while we stop to stretch, eat, go to the bathroom, and the car has another 300 miles on it, at which point we stop for the night because we’ve been driving for 10 hours. It’s about the least painful experience I’ve ever had. But this is also very much a point in time discussion. I’ll wager in 5 years EV come with enough capacity to drive a full day without break or longer. The reality is that today 5 hours of continuous drive time is plenty of time to warrant a break long enough to recharge to capacity unless you’re big on deep vein thrombosis and drive with a catheter.

Waiting an hour to charge sounds horrific. That charges also takes much longer than filling a tank. And what if you need to recharge multiple times on a trip? I agree with the user above. EVs are awesome for short trips. They're terrible for long trips. We hope this improves over time.

This is the worst case outlier where the charger happened to be free in a city center location and I had nowhere to be.

Our typical usage of the car:

Wife drives for work to another city 185km away in the morning and back in the evening. So 370km round trip.

During summer: she leaves with the car charged to 90% and arrives back with more than 10% left. Zero time waited charging anywhere.

During winter -20C: she leaves with the car charged to 100% and battery prewarmed. Arrives at the destination with about 45% battery left. On the way back she spends 10 minutes at a 150kW fast charger next to a service station that happens to serve her favorite Goulash. Arrives home with more than 10% battery left.

Sounds like EV works great for your use case.

It is great to hear it works for your wife. I am forgetful and clumsy, and there would be days I will either forget to charge the car or not plug it in properly. This is not a big deal for an ICE car (petrol or diesel). However, you need a lot more discipline driving an EV car.

This is what the article is trying to highlight. For many people, EV cars are perfectly fine to use right now. However, only 25% of cars on the road are plugin electric (UK figures). Most of these are hybrid cars, reverting to fossil fuels when the EV battery drains. If you want to get to 100%, the government needs to do more than formulate policies.

Going to the gas station every week sounds horrific. I'd rather wait a bit on the one trip I take every other year than be forced to go to the gas station in the winter instead of plugging in when I get home.

This corroborates the point. You almost never travel far, so EVs are great for your use case. For those of us who do travel more regularly, EVs are very inconvenient.

It clearly works for you, and that is great to hear. When travelling with small children, an hour can be a long time. During busy periods like Easter, there are generally huge queues for the superfast charging stations close to the main motorways in the UK.

Technology will advance, and more superfast charging stations will be available soon. However, as the article highlights, there are still challenges. Unless you can charge at home, and unfortunately, not everyone can, EV trips can be more expensive. Time will solve this, however, that doesn't mean that the government can dictate policies without ensuring there is proper investment in EV infrastructure.

> Tesla cars aren't better objectively from a purely functional approach.

I think this isn't as clear cut as it might sound. It depends on the usage pattern, local fuel cost etc. I drive a diesel too, but my next car will be an EV.

If you have cheap gas and/or regularly travel so far you need to charge on the road, then both the economy and convenience goes down the drain very quickly.

But if like me you have electricity at $0.10/kWh, you have 3x25A wires to your house, you can charge in your driveway, you very rarely need to charge on the road, and the diesel price is $10 per US gallon then the economy and convenience is completely different and much more favors EV.

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